IGMS Issue 50 (5 page)

"We can both go."

Ferri gazes at me as if contemplating the offer. "You've seen what I do to stay alive," she says. "The cardinal rationalized my killings as being for the church's greater good. You'll have no such lies to sooth your conscience."

I look at the cardinal's dead body. I should feel shame at breaking God's most powerful commandment, but I don't. "I stayed with Siface even though I hated him. And I don't hate you. More the opposite."

Ferri walks over and hugs me. Her hug is without emotion, as if she's acting in an opera no one will remember once the performance ends. But I still like that she makes the effort to hold me.

We hear shouts from the hall and someone bangs on the door. Releasing me, Ferri opens the cardinal's armoire and removes a small bag of gold, which she tosses to me along with a cloak. "We can't come back," she says. "The church will search for me, and another cardinal will eventually be appointed. If I'm found and the new cardinal orders me to kill you, I'll have no choice."

I nod. Even though Ferri is covered in blood and doesn't feel emotions, I grab her hand. I open the hidden passageway and we hurry down the dark stairs.

"Uccello," Ferri whispers. "Would Siface approve of our performance?"

I remember Siface's words:
I am a capon. I am a rooster crowing about nothing even as the performance rolls ever on.

It does indeed.

As I follow Ferri out of the palace I whisper an aria Siface taught me, not caring if my voice will never be as good as he'd dared to dream.

Remy had been sitting alone in the cell for twenty minutes when the guard-drone appeared at the bars, its laser scanner flickering over the barcode above the lock. "Inmate 1313269, Jansen, Marcus Richard. Your mother has posted bail." The door to the cell slid open.

Remy had no clue who Jansen was. Neither, apparently, did the drone. Billy Big Lips had told him that every now and then you could glitch up the drones just by smudging the barcodes. Luckily, Remy had an abundant supply of sticky blood to test the theory. Still, he couldn't believe it had worked.

"'Bout time," Remy said, as the drone held out a baggie containing Jansen's wallet, watch, and keys.

Remy sauntered out of jail holding his head high, unafraid that the facial recognition in the cameras might make out his true identity. He'd had the good fortune of being arrested by one of the few human cops left in Houston. He'd appealed to the cop's shared humanity to give him a pass. The cop had responded that he had nothing in common with a low life bean runner. Remy had kindly pointed out that the cop's mother had a different opinion, which she'd expressed the night before with extreme physical enthusiasm. The cop had then used his nightstick to knock out two of Remy's teeth, break his nose, and turn his left eye into a purple swollen mass the size of a baseball.

Remy walked three blocks before inspecting the wallet. According to his license, Jansen was 48 years old. The photo showed a bald Caucasian man with a drooping left eye, a bent nose, and several missing teeth. Other slots of the wallet held a condom, a fortune cookie fortune (
Time mends a broken heart
), and a three week old lottery ticket. No credit cards, just one lonely digibuck. Remy pressed the dollar sign. The digibuck blinked a balance of $9.63.

Remy, a 23-year-old Asian with thick, jet-black hair and, until today, far more symmetrical features, put on Jansen's watch. 6:30 p.m. He'd missed by half an hour the deadline to deliver the beans to Space Gorilla Max. One hundred pounds of prime Columbian java were stuffed into the seat linings of his '27 Chevy, now sitting unreachable in the police impound lot. Remy was dead. Space Gorilla Max did not tolerate failure. The big ape barely tolerated success. The best Remy could hope for was that Space Gorilla Max would kill him by breaking his neck in one smooth, crisp snap, the way he had with Billy Big Lips. He certainly didn't want to be strangled with his own intestines like poor Vinnie.

Poor, poor Vinnie.

Remy's own intestines grumbled angrily. When the cop had pulled him over, he'd choked down the few dozen coffee beans he'd been carrying in his jacket pocket. The Thardexians had negotiated an intergalactic ban on the beans after most of their population got hooked on coffee and a bloody civil war had broken out. In the name of interplanetary order, coffee smugglers now faced the death penalty. Every muscle in his body felt tight and tense as caffeine leached into his bloodstream. His fingers wriggled with unspent energy. Crazy thoughts sparked like neon in dark corners of his mind.

Remy had one chance. He had to get off planet. Better still, out of the solar system. He needed a rocket ship. Nine bucks wasn't going to turn the nut on any legal option. It was time to break into the piggy bank.

As luck would have it, the central rail station was practically next door to the jail. He strolled in casually, ignoring the people casting glances at his mangled face. He found his locker. Fortunately, the retinal scan was tuned to his right eye.

He removed the backpack and slung it over his shoulder. With his caffeine-jazzed strength, he thought it felt a little light. He headed for the men's room and ducked into the first open stall. Unzipping the pack, he saw the bills. Thirty grand in Canadian brownbacks, one of the last paper currencies legally recognized by the Empire of Texas. With a little wheeling and dealing, thirty grand was just about the exact price he'd need to get a ticket to Mars. He knew, however, that this would be a one-way trip. Once he left Earth, he wasn't coming back. Which meant he had something else he needed to do with the money.

He boarded the centerline, heading north, toward the Galleria. Few people on the train gave him a second glance. Anyone with money traveled via the fleet of robotic taxis that ceaselessly roamed the streets. No one worth robbing or begging from would ever be caught dead on the centerline. From the number of drab uniforms, he suspected every other passenger was on their way to one of the government mandated jobs at least one member of each household was required to hold down. Since robots now filled all the essential low skilled niches in the labor market, most of the remaining jobs came with some element of symbolic humiliation. Though there were robots who could do the job better, some wealthy people still liked to have people bow in front of them to shine their shoes, gather up dog poop, or wax their pubes.

Reaching the Galleria, he wound his way through the service tunnels the help used to reach their jobs so as not to tarnish the experience of the wealthy shoppers above. He went down the dimly lit hall to the back of the Brazil Salon. He rapped lightly on the door.

Serena, the manager, opened the door and gasped. "Remy!"

"Shhh," he said, placing a finger to his lips. "Tell my mother I need to see her."

"Butyour face--"

Remy waved away her worries. "Fell down some stairs. Looks worse than it is."

Serena went back inside. A few seconds later, the door opened again. His mother's face turned pale when she saw him.

"Oh, Remy," she whispered.

"I'm okay," he said.

"I know a broken nose when I see it. And your cheek! You might have fractured your zygomatic bone."

Twenty years ago, Remy's mother had been a surgeon in the Independent Nation of California. Now, the thought of human hands wielding steel knives on flesh was considered barbaric. Robotic surgeons with laser scalpels had rendered his once-esteemed mother obsolete. She now maintained her government benefits by giving bikini waxes.

Remy handed her his backpack. "Don't open this until you get home," he said. "Butyou don't need to work here anymore."

His mother's face sank. "This is jitter money, isn't it?"

"It's freedom," he said. "Just take it. I don't need it."

She shoved the bag back into his hands. "Did one of your hoodlum friends do this to your face?" she said. "Was it that gorilla?"

"If it was the gorilla, my head wouldn't be attached to my shoulders," he said.

"You don't need to do this, Remy," said his mother. "You know your uncle would let you work on his farm."

His uncle ran an organic pot farm back in California. Getting into the business would mean years of shoveling dung. The only upside would be that at least rich people wouldn't be watching him do it. But it would be best that Space Gorilla Max not catch up to him at a place with a lot of picks and shovels.

"It's too late for that now," he said. "I have to go. Keep this." He dropped the backpack at her feet.

"Remy!" she said as he walked away. She began to sob. He didn't look back.

He headed down the tunnel toward the centerline, thinking through a dozen different plans on how he could get to Mars. He knew a lot of friendly baggage inspectors with the commercial rockets. The problem was, Space Gorilla Max knew the same people, and by now the big ape had almost certainly gotten word that Remy hadn't made his delivery. He couldn't trust anyone.

This meant he'd need to steal a private rocket. As luck would have it, the Galleria had a touchdown lot for upscale clients who dropped in from their mansions on the moon for a little shopping and dinner at Sal's. In fact, unless the big ape had completely changed his itinerary, Space Gorilla Max and his boys were probably dining at Sal's right now. Which meant his rocket would be waiting in the lot.

Remy grinned, though only briefly, since his face hurt too much to maintain the expression. Five minutes later, he was on the roof, staring at Space Gorilla Max's swanked-out, fire-colored, ten-story space phallus, with its mirror glass portals and gleaming chrome fins.

Yeah. Yeah, this was exactly what the universe owed him.

Remy spotted Tyro and Wilson, two of Max's goons. They were vaping weed, shooting the breeze, their backs to the vehicles. Remy hugged the shadows, darting from rocket to rocket. Remy had noticed once before that Space Gorilla Max didn't lock his doors when he left his ride--why bother? Nobody could possibly mistake his rocket for someone else's, and anyone stupid enough to even brush against a tailfin would have his head ripped off. But Remy wasn't stupid. He was desperate and buzzed. He had to get to Mars, then to Saturn, then to Thardex One.

Remy climbed the ladder to the cockpit and slipped into the leather pilot's seat. The controls were in protected mode, but Remy had a way with machines. It took him a sweaty three minutes to hotwire the launch sequence. With white knuckles, he gripped the joystick. He punched the pedal to the floor and hit 9 g's inside a quarter minute. The haze of the city sky quickly cleared to reveal the stark black velvet of space.

Next stop: Mars.

Fortunately, Mars was closer than it used to be. The distance had shrunk when the Thardexians arrived, drawn by signs of industrial life visible in a spectroscopic analysis of our atmosphere. The Thardexians had been amused by mankind's quaint notions about physics. For instance, gravity. They loved how we'd taken our immediate experience of gravity and worked it out into a model that applied to all of the visible universe. They'd erupted in big, alien, belly laughs when they realized we'd explained the discrepancies between our theories and our observed movements of galaxies by postulating that 96% of the universe was made up of dark energy and dark matter.

"Really?" the Chief Thardexian Science Poobah had asked. "96% off didn't seem suspicious?"

Thardexians modeled space-time as a kind of nine dimensional, spiky, knotted pretzel. It was possible to jump from spike to spike without passing through intervening space. When human physicists pointed out that the Thardexian model made no sense whatsoever mathematically, the Thardexians seemed bewildered that we expected reality to make sense. There was still a heroic band of theoreticians intent on finding a way to integrate human and Thardexian physics, but that was all over Remy's head. All he knew was, using the Thardexian spike-space map, Mars lay six hours away via ultra-fast, swoopy-sleek rocket ship.